Remember this blog? I barely did either, but today necessitates its use for, if nothing else, my sanity.
I love America. I truly, truly do. It, in a very real way, was my first love. I've been to 47 of her states; I served in her Army for 5 years. Every political stance I take is predicated on what I believe to be what's best for my country as a whole and not my wallet or some other self serving interest.
In lieu of yet another tragic mass shooting, this time at a gay night club in Orlando, it's time for me to yet again give me thoughts on another tragedy.
There is so much blame to go around. The shooter, obviously, first and foremost. ISIS, who apparently radicalized him and inspired him via the internet, is probably a close second. Homophobia is right up there. Guns themselves certainly have a place. This particular mass shooting, the worst one in America's dubious history of them, is probably a despicable concoction of domestic terrorism with foreign terrorist roots with a side of hate crime and potentially a mental health disorder as well.
All of these elements are worth analyzing, addressing and eliminating. Yet one of those elements to our country's gun violence epidemic is met with a collective shoulder shrug : guns themselves. It's painful to feel compelled to point out that guns are a huge part of the gun violence issue, but we've reached this point.
America makes up little less than 5% of the world's population but owns 31% of all of its mass shootings since the 1960s. We're a first world country with a third world crisis on steroids. But there never seems to be enough political will to tackle the gun portion of the gun violence issue. It's mind boggling.
How dismissive large segments of the population are to this issue is very much a cause of these tragedies. There's no panacea, but people dealing in the reality of the situation and mobilizing the political will to reform gun laws is absolutely a crucial step in curing this national health crisis and not being the best of the worst on this issue.
This is far from a cry to ban all guns and to rescind the 2nd Amendment. I do believe the Constitution guarantees the rights of individuals to own arms. I get the desire to own a firearm in order to help protect your family. (Though a midsize dog is a far better deterrent.) I also embrace the recreational activity of practicing one's marksmanship and hunting animals, especially when population control for the own animal's sake is necessary.
When i was six, I asked my parents for my own gun. They got me a BB gun and my dad spent a whole week training me on how to use it and how to respect it. He instilled in me a belief my BB Gun was no different that a AR-15. I treated it as such. I never shot towards a house or aimed my gun at a person. Why? It wasn't a toy. It was a weapon.
And that has been lost on people. While they can be used for sport and fun they're primary design, their origins are to kill people with ease. Period. End of story.
We let people own drones, but we don't let civilians own drones with hell-fire missiles and other military grade hardware attached to them. Yet we let people own de facto military grade weapons of war that can kill masses of people with ease. Can't we logically accept that civilians shouldn't own military grade drones and weapons?
The AR-15 is not all that different from an M4, what they issued to me to protect myself from the Taliban. To put it more bluntly, they gave me a slightly more jacked up AR-15 to kill the enemy. And the same gun fell into the hands of a known wife beating homophobic ISIS sympathizer. AR-15 and other powerful semi automatic weapons have also fallen into the hands of hateful racists, the deranged and domestic and foreign terrorists.
We're a country awash in private gun ownership and rarely do they protect the population from others with private guns. In a country of 300 million people and probably even more privately, legally owned guns, there's only 260 or so justifiable homicides a year. Thank goodness those people had their guns and protected themselves and loved ones from harm, but if the bad guys didn't have such easy access to those guns would the justifiable homicides have even been necessary in the first place? Oh, and about 11,200 gun homicides happen every year. Basic arithmetic and such.
I've heard a lot of people say that if people in that Orlando gay nightclub were packing heat that shooter wouldn't have killed nearly as many people. Let's just ignore how concerning it is some people feel compelled to have a gun on them at all times just to feel safe. Instead focus on the victim blaming. It's the exact same inexcusable action of blaming a rape victim. "Well, how much did she have to drink?" "Well, she was asking for it by what she was wearing." "Well, if he was wearing his holster maybe he wouldn't be dead right now."
America, I love you, but you've really let me, millions of others and, most of all, 50 precious Orlando lives down. It's not to say you're guilty. It is is to say you/we bare much of the responsibility. Drop the victim blaming, or saying it's a lack of prayer in schools, or that it's just foreign terrorism. Let's just collectively act like adults and admit it: semi-automatic rifles are far too powerful to be left in the hands of a civilian population that has a small minority of whack jobs and evil souls who do a large amount of damage with them. We're not safer because of them. Quite clearly the opposite is, and has been, true.
